Steve Jones is the editor of SQLServerCentral.com and visits a wide variety of data related topics in his daily editorial. Steve has spent years working as a DBA and general purpose Windows administrator, primarily working with SQL Server since it was ported from Sybase in 1990. You can follow Steve on Twitter at twitter.com/way0utwest

The launch event is tomorrow in LA and I'm not going, and find myself a little disappointed. There will be a Denver event on Mar 20 and I'm planning on going, but with kids out of school, we'll have to see how that goes with my wife.

I've been calling for Service Pack 3 and I've been debating the need, the criticality, and even the problems with the process. There's been an interesting debate with people both at SQLServerCentral.com, internal Microsoft people I know, and in the MVP forums. What's amazing to me is how many people… Read more

I get a bit of a delay in working on the set down in the basement thanks to the weather. It was beautiful today, nearly 60F and without much wind, so I did my semi-weekly podcast work outside, getting 4 done today that I'd previously written.

Some see this as a misnomer, or even an oxymoron. Many countries don't allow "engineer" to be a title for software because it's not regulated like engineering is. Some think it's a joke, given the state of software development, the constant missed schedules and problems.

I started working through some labs for my SQL Server 2008 class and one of the labs was on the new Change Data Capture, essentially an auditing action that allows you to tell what changes have been made to data in a table, including insertions and deletions. You have to… Read more

Windows 2008 RTM'd this week, which means that in a few weeks, at the February Launch event, there will be two products that are shipping and have RTM'd, leaving only SQL Server 2008 as a product that's not yet finished. And likely won't be for 6 months.